I’m not sure how to start this post. I don’t want to come off as some sappy, tree-hugging girl who’s found enlightenment and wants to push it on everyone around her with a persistent smile and earnest insistence.
I just want to tell you that I like using the headspace.com site for meditation, and that’s it.
I like it.
I like it a lot.
Headspace is a website with guided meditations with a whole array of topics and length of session. Headspace.com was founded by Englishman Andy Puddicombe who had spent 10 years studying meditation around the world. So I’ll just tell you why I like it:
Headspace is perfect for newbies
You can start your meditation practice with a free trial of headspace which includes a 10 day program of 10 minutes per day. You just sign up on the website www.headspace.com and Andy (the founder and voice behind all the meditations) talks you gently through each step. No obligation, and long enough to get a good feel for whether you’ll like it or not.
It was doing the 10 days that confirmed that headspace.com was the right thing for me.
Headspace is simple to use
You can download the headspace app (from itunes or Google Play) and have it available wherever you are. This is perfect for those that want to meditate while they commute to work (on public transport obvs) or there’s even walking or jogging meditations.
I have the worlds dumbest and slowest phone, so I just use headspace.com on my laptop, and it’s totes fine. I’m not sure I could cope with too much noise around me (during a commute) but when I meditate at 4am, even the birds are quiet. 😛
Headspace eliminates the excuses
Okay, so this one is a very subjective point of view. It eliminated MY excuses. I didn’t have to search for another guided meditation on the internet. I just open up headspace and it’s already queued up with todays session. I don’t have to think about what type of session I’m going to do, it will just play the next day in whatever series I’m working on.
For example, at the moment I’m going through the ‘Self-Esteem’ series in the Health category. It goes for 30 days, so each session follows on from what you learnt the day before. You have a chance to repeat techniques over a number of days and practice, practice, practice.
Headspace gives you the confidence that you’re doing this ‘meditation thing’ right.
You see, it’s like having a coach right there with you. Telling you what you should be doing, reassuring you that you’re not weird if your mind keeps wandering off, or you fall asleep. Encouraging you to keep going (but not in a rah-rah way, just with calm and reassuring confidence).
You can choose the timeframe
At the beginning of each series you can decide how long you want each session to be. Starting at 10 minutes and I think some of them even go up to an hour. The longer sessions just add more quiet time between when Andy is talking.
At the moment I’m still sitting on the 10 minute sessions. I did have this series set to 15 minutes but found myself getting too distracted by the long silences, thinking that my computer had gone to sleep… or realising that I had. 😮 So you can adjust the timing.
Andy isn’t annoying!
I’ve listened to other guided meditations (admittedly they were free ones found on youtube) where I just wanted to throttle the person speaking. They do weird stuff like talk really slow, or their voice changes tone at the end of EVERY SENTENCE. Or they drag out the last word of every sentence.
Andy just talks normally. I think he probably does talk slow, but I can still hear his personality in his voice, I don’t feel like I’m listening to a robot. And the recording quality is good; like, I can’t hear him swallowing or licking his lips etc.
And here are the cons in my opinion. Well, not really cons, more just concerns… oh, is that what cons stands for?
I depend on headspace
Headspace is not teaching me how to meditate by myself. Even though I’m three months into this, I don’t feel at all equipped to just meditate by myself without the guidance of the app. They do have some unguided meditations that you can use, but I don’t know that there is a series you can go through to work yourself up to unguided.
Headspace isn’t exactly cheap
I’m not sure this is a concern really; well, it isn’t a concern for me. But it’s worth noting that headspace is a subscription service that costs US$80 per year. Meditation is something that you do by yourself and can be completely self-guided, so it kinda seems counter-intuitive that you should pay for someone to talk you through it. But… if you’ve never done it before, how do you know what to do or whether you’re even doing it right? So for me, I think it’s a total bargain that I get meditation lessons FOR A WHOLE YEAR for just 80 bucks.
I would like to think that at the end of a year, I’m pretty confident and comfortable with meditation that I don’t feel the need to have someone talk me through it. That I can just do it myself. That’s what I’d like to work towards. But if I need some more time, then I’ll buy another year.
I’ve just worked it out that if I use headspace every day for a year (which is my intention), then it costs 22 cents (or 33 cents in NZ) per session. Ummm hullo! I don’t know where you can get any coach for that price?
I honestly didn’t expect to go on about headspace for so many words. But I just like it and how it works well for me. Add to that the fact that headspace works with other organisations and gifts subscriptions to charities, I like them even more.
If you want to try them out, head on over to www.headspace.com and do the 10 day trial.
Do you use any other online guided meditation services? What’s your experience been like?
[grwebform url=”https://app.getresponse.com/view_webform_v2.js?u=BX4f2&webforms_id=5574901″ css=”on” center=”off” center_margin=”200″/]
Pin this post!
No Comment